Fatigue failure of polyethylene methacrylate in adhesive assembly under unsymmetrical bending

In this paper, a special bending fatigue experiment was firstly performed to investigate the fatigue behavior of polyethylene methacrylate in adhesive assembly. Fatigue lifetime property (S–N curve) was obtained. Finite element calculations on the whole structures also gave the same results with the testing. Based on the experimental data and finite element analysis, a local stress law of predicting bending fatigue lifetime was put forward. The predication lifetime for the polyethylene methacrylate agreed well with the experimental results. Following the strain energy density (SED) criterion was applied to predict the crack initiation and growth path of the adhesive assembly. The predicted results were in good agreement with the optical microscopy (OM) failure image of the failure specimen. SEM image of fracture further showed that there were lots of parallel fatigue lines with perpendicularity to the direction of crack, and an obvious boundary from the crack propagation failure to final brittle fracture.